After another embarrassing loss, this time to the Tampa Bay Buccaneers 38-3, the Chicago Bears ownership needs to take a hard look at making changes.
In Week 7, the Chicago Bears totally forgot they had a game. They traveled to Tampa to face Tom Brady and the Bucs. They fell flat on their faces, losing 38-3. That score didn’t indicate how badly the Bears lost.
At the end of the first quarter, the Bears looked up at a 21-0 deficit. They became the first team this season to do that.
It got worse from there.
Again, the offense struggled to score points. For the fourth time this season, they failed to reach 20 points. Once again, third-down conversions were a huge problem.
The Bears entered the game ranked 28th in third-down conversions at 33.3 percent. That total took another hit as Chicago converted just 2-of-11 on third downs. To make matters worse, three of their five turnovers happened on third downs.
There was one bright spot, however. Khalil Herbert tore up the top rushing defense in the NFL. He ran for 100 yards, 91 of them in the first half. With the big deficit, the Bears had to throw more. He averaged 5.6 yards per run against a defense that held opposing runners to just 3.4 yards per run.
Herbert added 33 receiving yards for a total of 133 all-purpose yards. Not a bad day considering how awful the rest of the team performed. Somewhere in Chicago David Montgomery‘s rehab is getting more intense.
A disturbing pattern emerges
Another week passes in which the Chicago Bears face a very good team and another time they suffer an embarrassing loss. They opened the season with a 34-14 loss to the Los Angeles Rams. The defense continually allowed big plays and the offense couldn’t find the end zone.
In Week 3, the Bears lost to the Cleveland Browns 26-3. The offense could muster just one yard of passing and 47 yards total. Last week, they took an early 7-0 lead against the Green Bay Packers. However, they allowed the Packers to score 17 unanswered points. Chicago lost 24-14.
During head coach Matt Nagy’s tenure in Chicago, his teams, win or lose, were competitive. That is changing. We’re seeing the team struggle more and now we’re seeing more blowouts. I wrote last week about how it was time for the McCaskeys to change their policy of waiting until the end of the season to fire their head coaches. Sunday’s game was more evidence to support that opinion.
The Bears still have games against some good teams over their next 10 games. They face the San Francisco 49ers, the Pittsburgh Steelers, the Arizona Cardinals, the Baltimore Ravens, the Packers, and the Seattle Seahawks. They also have two games against the hot Minnesota Vikings, who are now ahead of the Bears in the standings. If you think things are ugly now, just wait until those games if things don’t improve and they have a lame-duck head coach.
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Ownership cannot continue to watch the team’s downfall
The McCaskeys cannot afford to sit around and drink Mai Tais while Rome is burning. The more they wait to fire Nagy the worse things will get. It’s not just the team as a whole that will suffer but rookie quarterback Justin Fields‘ development as well.
Fields is the franchise quarterback the team spent the better part of a century trying to find. There is no expectation of a long playoff run with this team. The most important matter on the team’s agenda is Fields’ development.
Sunday was Fields’ worst performance. All five turnovers were made by him. He threw three interceptions and fumbled three times, losing two of them. He looked lost at times and indecisive at others.
The coaches might have also given Fields bad information in his headset as well. On one of his interceptions, a coach told him that Tampa had 12 men on the field. Similar to the offsides he thought he had against Green Bay last week, he thought there was a free play.
Also similar to last week, there was no flag. Fields threw the ball and the pass got intercepted. Here was his explanation.
In the headset they were telling me we had 12 men on the field, so I was trying to snap the ball quick… So I’m thinking, ‘All right, scramble around and stuff like that. And then, of course, I see A-Rob downfield and I think he slips and of course the pick. I mean, that’s just trying to get 12 people on the field, and then it just went bad from there.
In addition to a bad game plan, underutilizing his skills, and no in-game adjustments, now Fields is getting bad info from the coaches. Things are going from bad to worse. If the McCaskeys allow this to continue and get worse the Bears deserve whatever negative outcomes come their way.
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